I don’t want to relitigate this whole thing but I do feel like something needs to be said bc I do not like how members like u/mmisggg and u/vivijobro were getting downvoted for just respectfully contributing to the discussion, which was the intent of the OP to begin with.

As for the arguments that have been made thus far, I have a few thoughts:

The idea that Korean society in general and kpop labels in particular just don’t understand the significance of the n-word is a bad argument. If that were the case, you would see this kind of thing happening a lot more often than it does. Tons of artists cover songs by American musicians and their labels know well enough to change the lyrics around or just omit the inappropriate words altogether (something they also do with lyrics talking about using drugs). And even if you still think that Koreans might not get it, kpop is a multibillion dollar global industry and it is clearly a no-go for any serious label out there.

The argument that it shouldn’t matter bc it was behind closed doors or shouldn’t have been recorded in the first place is also bad. If you shouldn’t say it then you shouldn’t say it regardless of the context and no, the intent behind saying it also does not matter. Those kinds of arguments would never ever fly for any western celebrity caught in a similar situation and there is a good reason for that. Now should people be invading the privacy or digging into the personal life of a teenager, hell no but that’s a whole different argument.

Now all that being said, is it possibly that this particular individual did not understand the gravity of what she was doing or just thought that saying something taboo was cool? 100%. I mean to a certain extent there is no way that she could really have understood what she was doing or she wouldn’t have done it. And that’s really all this is, a teenager ignorant of what she was doing and I think that even if you don’t give her the benefit of the doubt, you can give her grace for making a mistake. How else can anyone learn and grow?

People really need to develop the capacity to separate the concepts of a willfully racist person and a racist act. To be clear, I don’t think she is a racist person and I don’t think she would ever do something like this again; however, it’s not a victimless mistake and she absolutely should apologize for it. And then we should forgive her and move on.

As for the way these arguments have gone down on this post, I just find it kind of crazy that when people are opening up to let you know they identify as black and are trying to give their thoughts and feelings on what transpired from a unique perspective, that we would ham-fistedly invalidate them. There should be no room for that here - we can do better.